recover her good sense; and then spoke a few wise and kind words of explanation of his duty to his prince which set her right for life. “So great was his reason and goodness,” she writes, “that, upon consideration, it made my folly appear tome so vile, that, from that day, until the day of his death, I never thought fit to ask him any business but what he communicated freely to me, in order to his estate or family.” About such things he did communicate freely from the day when they married upon twenty pounds, in the most private way at Oxford, where the king’s servants began their training in hardship, to the last of their joint lives: and when they could no longer converse and consult in privacy, at home, they daringly talked in the open air from the window to the ground. Of course, this was in the dark, and when they could communicate in no other way. He was imprisoned at Whitehall; and she went there from Chancery Lane every morning before daybreak, with a dark lantern, on foot, alone, and in all weathers, slipped into the entry upon which her husband’s window opened, carried him news, and received his directions. After the first time, when he did not expect her at four in the morning, he never failed to put out his head instantly, in answer to her soft call. Sometimes she was so wet with the rain that it went in at her neck and out at her heels; but that was no matter, if she could learn how best to make application to Cromwell on her husband’s behalf—a thing which she did successfully, owing, as she told her children, to the Protector’s great respect for their father.
She once showed an equal disregard of another kind of rain,—an iron shower from an enemy at sea. A Turkish galley menaced the vessel in which the Fanshawes were going to Spain; and the only chance of escape from slavery was by putting on a warlike appearance, and hiding all the women and the merchandise. So the ladies were locked into the cabin, whence indeed Lady Fanshawe had been too sick to move. Now, however, when her husband was in danger on deck, she never rested till she had brought a cabin-boy to the door, got him to open it, and possessed herself of his blue thrum cap and his tarred coat. She put half-a-crown in his hand, and he let her pass up to the deck, where she stole softly to her husband’s side, “as free from sickness and fear,” she tells her children, “as, I confess, from discretion.” This time her husband had no rebuke ready for her indiscretion. Looking upon her he blessed himself, and snatched her up in his arms, saying, “Good God! that love can make this change!” He bethought himself at length of chiding her; but it was with a laughing and a glistening eye,—both then and ever after.
We have some of us heard a story lately—full of a more solemn sweetness than this—a story as animating as it is mournful, of such a wife with her husband at sea. Each age has its own mode of disclosure of the moral greatness of the men and women of the time; and in this case, through the ways and circumstances of our century—of even the latter half of it—we see in Mrs. Patton the mind and soul of the best wife of the noblest Crusader of six centuries ago.
One February day, four years since, the people who happened to be on the Battery at New York, saw that a sick person was being carried in a litter from a ship to the Battery Hotel. Beside the litter walked a young girl, as a careless passenger might have supposed: but others were struck by the strangeness of such youthfulness in one with so careworn a face. She was also obviously near her confinement. She was twenty, in fact, and had been married three years to the man in the litter. She had been brought up in gaiety and indulgence in a prosperous home in East Boston, and had married a gallant young sea captain. In the first days of the honeymoon, Captain Patton was offered the command of the Neptune’s Car, a ship fitted out for the circumnavigation of the globe, and delayed by the illness of the commander. Captain Patton declined this great piece of professional advancement, on the ground that he could not leave his bride, for so long a time, at an hour’s warning. He was told she might go with him; she was willing, and they were established on board within twelve hours from the first proposal being made.
They were absent a year and five months; and from the outset she made herself her husband’s pupil, companion and helper, to his great delight. She studied navigation, and learned everything that he could teach her, and was soon habituated to take observations, steer by the chart, and keep the ship’s reckoning. In August 1856, they sailed again in their beloved vessel for California, making sure that the ship they were so proud of, and so familiar with, would beat two others which started at the same time. The race which ensued disclosed to Captain Patton the evil temper and designs of his first mate, who was evidently bent on defeating his purpose, and, for some unknown reason, on carrying the ship into Valparaiso. Before Cape Horn was reached, the captain was suffering from anxiety and vigilance. There it was necessary to depose the mate; and under the toil of supplying his place, Captain Patton’s health gave way entirely. A fever was followed by congestion of the brain; but he had had time to put his wife in full possession of his purposes. The ship was by no means to go to Valparaiso; for the crew would desert, and the cargo be lost before the consignees could arrive. His honour and conscience were concerned, he said, in going to the right port. This settled everything in his wife’s mind. The ship should go to her destined port, and no other.
Her husband became hopelessly delirious; and the mate seized the opportunity to assume authority. He wrote a letter to Mrs. Patton, warning her not to oppose him, and charging her with the responsibility of the fate of every man in the vessel, if she presumed to interfere. She replied that her husband had not trusted him while he was well; and she should not trust him now that her husband was ill. She assembled the crew, told them the facts, and appealed to them. Would they accept her authority in her husband’s place, disregard the first mate, and work the ship under the orders of the second? Every man of them agreed, and she had nothing to complain of from them. They did what they could to sustain her. They saw her at her studies, as they passed the